Articles

Café Capers

I.

The trouble with language as a medium for artistic production is that it is already highly colonized, fraught, riddled with clots, memes and the sedimentary layers of all that has been thought. But so it goes, you just got to grab it by the nose & run it through the hose. Thus experience, thus life. The senses giving everything the 3rd degree in the 4th dimension. Descriptive prose. Everything only happens once. You can’t get out of the river of time, we’re drowned in the now. Is time travel a thing of the past? Only time will tell.

II.

Memory is also what’s happening when you open the sieve and name-check your version of events in a scrawl against the gates while all vanishes into the virtual leaving a fossil of analog time an alloy of lingering amazement soldered into song by solitary savants who use their memories of tomorrow like bottle openers to flip themselves into drunkenness – statutory popes in a strawberry arcade

III.

lyrics honed by solitude erupt from the past, made in back-seat conjugations of the subconscious which is substantially unconscious of its own intentions

cold commerce with February upsetting the angle of its erudition slipshod along the esplanades escaped into caped escapades moon: wracked, side-showed, spun into shadow as an agent of the sun howls into feral daylight

apostrophes of linoleum ammonia

(serious flicker of endings)

fluke of sloth

11 Oct. 2014

Ripp, A Calumny

your suave insolence confounds me, sir, I’ll have no succor for your rubbish nor your bile – pile your perfidies in a corner and set to blazes all your infamous drivel – you have paid your bills with coward’s alms, and must suffer the shades to appall you – we shall bear no further sufferance for your mottled wits, the wayward graces have burthened your fell purposes – use your shadow for a torch and burn a hole in the black silence that follows you – a red warp has inflicted a science in the air

*

Curl up your ears in diagonal scorn your ships foundering on fellowship the savages have burned your feast at the frontier your dreams have become libraries for the dead

The sewers are wrapped in piss even the foxglove grows restless at the diameters

In the long loquacious evenings of your borderline dispute – the accuracy of many in the emptiness of the few – drain your savage bromides to forgotten music – the chimney’s song baffles your smoke – the fire-office has gone silent, the evening owns its ghost

13 Oct. 2014

ROB CHALFEN: Wrote ‘The Bagel Pusher’, an Ionesco-type play at age 12 (1965) and was published in Flash Comics the same year. Edited family newsletters, high-school scandal-sheets & Cold Turkey (1970) the school literary mag, as well as errant psychedelia like Frog Motion Review & Blacklight Boogie (1971). Labored as an ink-stained wretch for Boston & Amherst newspapers. Cranked sweatshop hack for gun-toting NYC publishing gangsters of cheesy rock mags (1978). Freelance, ‘80s: “Better Proof-read than Dead”. Edited early computer manuals, land-use policy studies, god knows what else. Published Out Magazine (1985) and co-founded Small Press Alliance (1986-1988) a ‘zine scene’ publisher’s group. With Dr. Ahmed Fishmonger, co-wrote & published The Journal of the Institute for Parallel Studies (1996) itself an artifact from another dimension. Created & pubished The Zeitgeist Improbable (2002-2005), the monthly art & lit mag of Zeitgeist Gallery, Cambridge Mass. Glib Magazine (2009-present), a blog of literary miscellanea. Essay in The Battersea Review (2013).